Blackmagic Cinema Camera RAW workflow with FCP-X and Resolve

FCP.CO published Noam Kroll’s (from Creative Rebellion) workflow for his film ‘Brother Sister’ – shot with a Blackmagic Cinema Camera in RAW and edited in Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci Resolve.

Noam writes:

This was a new experience for me as I typically shoot straight to ProRes on the BMCC, but due to the nature of this project I opted to shoot everything in RAW, which turned out to be a great choice. It added a couple of extra steps to my normal process, and even though I used a fairly standard workflow, I still wanted to outline it here for those looking to work with this combination of camera and NLE as it seems to work exceptionally well and quite seamlessly.

My first step was to create proxy files from the RAW Cinema DNG’s. To do this I used DaVinci Resolve, as naturally it is built with the BMCC in mind. There are many other options for conforming BMCC footage including going to Photoshop or After Effects to create your proxies, but with the amount of time I had to do this, I used Resolve as I knew it was a tested workflow that was pretty bulletproof.

In Resolve I did a very minimal one light pass where I essentially balanced out contrast and brought down the exposure. This was crucial as on the BMCC you typically want to expose to the right and the images coming straight off the camera can look extremely overexposed. It would have been difficult to edit any material without first doing a quick one light pass on everything. This only took about half an hour as I wasn’t worried about adjusting white balance or anything else at that point.

Once the session was ready to be exported, I rendered out everything to ProRes LT .MOV files to edit in FCP X. I decided to go with ProRes LT rather than ProRes 422 as I knew there would be at least a small increase in speed once the edit got more intensive. In total I only had about 4 days to go from raw footage to a picture lock, so using LT files rather than 422 put my mind more at ease.

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